Page 246 - Successful Onboarding

Getting Started: Conducting a Program Diagnostic • 227

an article at face value, it is easy to see how managers new to onboarding
might accord the discipline a limited scope and regard starting a program
as simply a process of collecting and deploying what others have done.
A best practice only helps if it matches your company’s unique circum-
stances and objectives. Under different conditions, a best practice devel-
oped by another company could prove useless, and worse yet, a drain of
valuable resources. Many want to copy what Apple does, but that technol-
ogy firm possesses skills, competencies, culture, and objectives that most
other firms do not. We have to obtain their skills and competencies and
match their objectives if we hope to adopt a behavior or technique of theirs
with any success. As part of a thorough diagnostic process, we need to eval-
uate whether the variables at play in other, benchmark organizations resem-
ble ours closely enough to appropriate their best practices. If not, then we
need to determine whether we can take an existing best practice and mod-
ify it to fit our actual culture, operating conditions, and skill sets.
A proper diagnostic analysis helps us to arrive at the right priorities. Most
companies have limited budgets for onboarding, and better onboarding
could potentially address a wide variety of business issues and objectives.
We beg you, as practitioners in the field, to be intensely strategic in devis-
ing your program objectives. You can design a program that is well run,
appreciated, and recognized but that does not deliver appreciably on any
defined onboarding goals. A strong diagnostic phase allows companies to
go beyond just offering new hires an “enhanced and cool experience” and
devise a combination of program elements that creates maximum value.
Apple does not follow blindly what other firms are doing when it comes
to onboarding. As we’ve seen, the firm has gained notoriety around the Web
for greeting new hires with an exciting, high-concept welcome packet. In
incorporating this tool into their onboarding, the firm did more than give
new hires an amazing experience. It devised this tool to teach new hires
about the brand, and specifically, about the kind of experience the firm
wanted new hires to provide its customers. Apple’s welcome packet sup-
ported a key business strategy: the pursuit of customer centricity. Another
firm might pursue an entirely different strategic orientation, which would
lend itself to different tools and a different message. If General Motors places
strategic emphasis on building high-quality, durable products, its onboard-
ing packet might be, say, constructed of a durable material. The company
could then go on to express the importance of durability, and even link the